Someone Else’s Writing

I’m going to assume two things about you right now. One, I’m going to assume you are aware that there exists in this universe a television show called The Affair, which airs on Showtime and is currently in its fifth and final season. And two, I’m going to assume you don’t watch it, because as someone who has watched it I can’t imagine that other real, actual people watch it. Because it is terrible. And extremely white. But mainly terrible.

Was it always terrible? Maybe not, though it’s hard to remember. The reason I am still watching this terrible, terrible show is because The Duchess refuses to let go; once she begins watching something she hangs on with a death grip. I recall that when the show began, the whole conceit — and it needed a conceit because it’s fundamentally a show about wealthy white folks experiencing some truly dull mid-life crises — was that every episode was split into two perspectives that showed many of the same events from different points-of-view. That conceit was never as interesting or well-used as they thought it was, but the show barely even references it any more so it doesn’t matter.

I am not here, however, to complain (or, not much more than usual) or to discuss the decline of a show that was only mediocre to begin with. No! I am here to discuss the only actually interesting writing choice the show¹ has made this season: The reckless swerve into science fiction.

The Future’s So Meh, I Gotta Wear a Drab, Formless Sack

I have myself occasionally used a genre-mash to liven up a slowly dying manuscript. Sometimes it even works! A genre-mash is my own term, describing the sudden injection of speculative elements into a story that has been heretofore strictly realistic. A (dumb) example off the top of my head might be a murder mystery that plays out like a noir thriller for 50,000 words and turns out to have been a time travel story all along.

It’s a gimmick, but sometimes it can work. Now, this is not exactly what I think is going on with The Affair. What’s going on with The Affair is much more dumb.

So, as a quick bit of background (spoilers if you care about such things), The Affair started life as a show about, you know, an affair: A dickish, unhappy middle-aged man has an affair with a troubled, unhappy woman, and it blows up both their lives. The show has been concerned with a slowly-growing but pretty contained cast of characters ever since, exploring the many ways this affair has changed lives and affected personal histories.

One thread is the daughter of the unhappy woman, who the unhappy man originally thought was his but turned out to be the unhappy woman’s ex-husband’s (soapy stuff). This daughter, Joanie, is still a young kid in the main storyline, but the unhappy woman was murdered at the end of last season, and the decision was made to have an adult Joanie investigate the death thirty years later. As a result, a portion of The Affair season 5 is set in the future.

Okay, I can understand that plot decision. But here The Show had some narrative choices:

1. Acknowledge that it’s 2040 or something but don’t delve into the changes time hath wrought and keep the narrative focus narrow
2. Go full sci-fi with flying cars and an unending war with ruthless robot armies or something
3. Half-ass it with some baseline technology upgrades and a muddled environmental collapse story.

Sadly, they picked #3. This is the worst option. If you’re writing this story and decide the time-jump is necessary, #2 is the bold option that might yield narrative gold and #1 is the safe option that does the work you need without wasting a lot of energy. The third option is just pointless. It results in weird little tech doodads like tablets with air screens and glasses that can literally show you weather simulations from thirty years before, and a weird thread about climate change where everyone seems pretty convinced the world is ending and Long Island is supposedly sinking under the waves, but no one is particularly worried about it?

Then The Show apparently got tired trying and so there are a lot of weird moments where characters ignore the time jump and just use standard 2019 technology, which is totally because of laziness but is weakly sold as quirk. At one point a character offers Joanie a ride in his totally 2019-appropriate SUV and she smirks and says something about how no one uses gasoline any more, and he laughs it off. This is so stupid it hurts my brain, and it’s not the only time. In another scene, when a villain is tricking Joanie into signing something The Show is too lazy to mock up a cool tablet or something, and so he hands her a piece of paper, and she makes the same lame comment.

This, friends, is what is known as bad writing. If you’re gonna lean sci-fi, then lean the fuck in and commit. Sorry. I am angry, because I am being forced to watch this shit by The Duchess.

Don’t Half-Ass Sci-Fi

The secret to mashing up a non-speculative story with a sci-fi element is to lean into the genre stuff. The mistake The Affair made is feinting towards these elements but then getting scared and finding cheap ways to keep the look and feel of the future the same as the present. If your goal is to walk that line, if the point of your sci-fi is that the future will look exactly like 2019 with a new hat, that’s fine — as long as it’s purposeful. But deciding that the future will be a high-tech environmental disaster and then doing none of the world-building to make that work leaves you with just the hat.

I’m somewhat ashamed to admit that there was a time in my life when most of my conversational gambits were direct quotes from The Simpsons; in fact, my friends and I could hold entire conversations using just lines from the first, oh, ten seasons of the show. One that still sticks with me is Millhouse’s anguished demand to know ‘When are they gonna get to the fireworks factory?!’ in Season Eight’s ‘The Itchy and Scratchy and Poochie Show,’ wherein the ostensible plot of the show-within-a-show is about going to such a factory, which never actually happens. Over the years it’s been an easy shorthand for stories that promise some exciting moment that seems to never arrive, either due to glacial pacing or simple bad writing.

Some stories, however, start at the Fireworks Factory—and then slowly back away from it. Every TV show, film, novel, or comic book has a premise that attracts you, the core bit of awesome at the center of the story that is the main reason you’re in the audience in the first place. When you go to see an action movie, you’re looking for the stunts, for the incredible fight scenes. When you read a horror novel, you’re there because you’ve been promised a terrifying monster, or a terrifying curse. Something terrifying, certainly. Most stories take a little time to warm up to that promise, to develop characters and build a world, and then, finally, deliver on that promise.

Other stories do the exact opposite. They start off with the cool part. And then they incrementally abandon their own premise, becoming an entirely different story.

The Infinite Unpacking

Sometimes this happens because the writers didn’t actually have any interest in the premise they sold you in the first place. Consider, for example, the HBO reboot of Westworld.

The Fireworks Factory, in this case, would be the sublime chaos of super-advanced robots gaining some form of sentience and rebelling against the humans who have been paying exorbitant fees for the privilege of abusing and violently damaging them. The original 1973 film, written and directed by Michael Crichton, has an expected structure: You’re introduced to Westworld while it’s operating as expected, you learn the rules of the place, and then you get the demented fun of watching everything spiral out of control into wonderful robot violence.

The reboot more or less starts there, with the malfunctions starting very early in Season 1, and a slow build to the robot apocalypse. Using multiple and deceptive timelines, the writers start off with the robots going haywire—and then, just when the massacre starts, the season ends, and in Season 2 you only get glimpses of it. If you were hoping for sequences of guests fleeing from murderous robots, too bad: There are almost none. You never get to the Fireworks Factory, because the show was never heading there in the first place. Instead, the writers are much more interested in the increasingly complicated philosophical underpinnings of their story—what is sentience? What is life?

That doesn’t make it a bad story. It makes it a different story, that will never serve up the imagined scenes that got people to tune in initially.

The U-Turn

Sometimes, there’s a detour on the way to the Fireworks Factory because the story just doesn’t work the way the writer expected. The thing about a story is that it has to work in two very different arenas: In conception—that is, on paper, as an outline and a sketch—and in reality, as an actual story. Sometimes the outline and the concept have to be abandoned because once you start writing it just doesn’t work.

A good recent example of this is Fear the Walking Dead. The spinoff from The Walking Dead was originally pitched as a prequel of sorts that would explore the way society collapses under the onslaught of zombies. The first episode was set about six months before the main series. For a lot of folks this was exactly the Fireworks Factory they wanted to go to, because often the most intriguing and exciting parts of a zombie story is the part where civilization slowly unspools. You start with the subtle signs—the dire news reports, the mysterious government decisions—and then bit by bit normalcy bleeds away, until eventually you’re all running for your lives and putting all those Apex Legends skills to good use blowing the heads off zombies.

But Fear the Walking Dead quickly began transforming into a show that actually isn’t all that different from the main program—just a bunch of people trying to not be eaten by zombies in a world that’s pretty much collapsed. This is partly due to the fact that the writers just didn’t give themselves enough runway to work with; societal collapse is a slow-burn story, and would have required that you delay the arrival of zombie hordes for a long time, or at least kept them peripheral. That’s tough to do in a TV series that’s about zombies, and so the story got there quick. But that’s a different Fireworks Factory altogether.

Later seasons saw the show retooled and revamped to accept this; they’ve brought on crossover characters from the main show and abandoned any pretense that it’s about a different phase of the zombie apocalypse. There’s still a lot of opportunity for interesting stories there, of course. It’s just not the story that early viewers thought they were going to get.

Runway

It’s easy, as a writer, to misjudge how far material will take you. Sometimes a single sentence in a plot outline will power hundreds of pages of manuscript. Sometimes a page of outline will yield a single, thin chapter. It’s difficult to judge stuff like that before you’re elbow-deep in the storytelling. In other words, writing a book is sometimes like planning a trip to a Fireworks Factory but traffic gets really bad so you take a random exit, or the factory is abandoned and filled with bats so you go to an alternate factory nearby. And sometimes you start off with what seems like a reasonable analogy and lost control of it completely.

SPOILERS to follow, kids. If you haven’t seen Deadwood: The Movie and want to remain unspoiled, you been warned, you hooplehead. Also, this is hella long, so be warned; a certain amount of Deadwood obsession is probably necessary.

I love Deadwood. Not only did I watch the original series when it first aired on HBO 13 years ago, I recently re-watched all three seasons in May in preparation for the surprise movie released on May 31st so I’d have a fresh memory of all the events and where we left the characters.

I was there for this movie. Every bit of leaked information made me more excited: Set 10 years later? Check. Continuing the Hearst storyline? Check. No mention whatsoever of John Langrishe and his band of un-merry thespians? Check¹.

And I loved the movie–heck, I teared up at the end. Yet I was a little disappointed, a little dissatisfied, because of a few perceived flaws I chalked up to the immense task of tying off all those plots and stories and giving each beloved character at least something to do on screen.

Specifically, I was puzzled by Hearst’s final play at Trixie and Sol’s wedding. The character of George Hearst in Deadwood is many things: A monster, of course, a cretinous creature who play-acts at civility but lusts to dominate and destroy that which he cannot own. What he has never been on the show is stupid, or weak. He’s a man who revels in the power his money and political pull grants him, and a man who has never hesitated to surround himself with bodyguards. In fact, right up until the final confrontation in the movie, Hearst is always accompanied by plenty of armed guards.

And yet, at the end his play is incredibly weak. He braces the whole town, interrupts a beloved moment, and he does so with only two shitheel lawmen who are outside their jurisdiction and bearing a bullshit warrant. He has no guards, and his plan fails immediately and comically, resulting in his humiliation and beating at the hands of the whole town.

Initially this felt rushed to me, and I blamed a desire to offer fanservice, to see Hearst beaten and brought low. But that didn’t make sense. Not only was it a repeat of events in season 3 of the show, right down to the ear pulling, but it’s obviously pointless: Hearst will be released, he will continue to use his money and power to abuse the good folk of Deadwood, and none of Bullock’s posturing will matter. Again.

And then I realized the repetition of those events is the point, and I realized David Milch is a lot smarter a writer than I am a viewer.

I’m old enough to be amazed at the fact that I can just re-watch a TV show or movie whenever I want; when I was a kid this was impossible, and I still forget about this casual superpower sometimes. It’s a great opportunity to learn something from successful media; after watching it once (or twice) for the entertainment, you can go back watch it again for the structure, the writing tricks, and the fundamentals.

Recently I started re-watching Community, the sitcom that ran on NBC and Yahoo! for six seasons. Originally developed by Dan Harmon, who ran the show for season 1-3 and 5-6, I remember watching it pretty enthusiastically on its original run (it might actually be the last broadcast network show I ever voluntarily watched, actually). It was funny, it pushed some boundaries and did unexpected things.

Watching it again, it made me think about how we write about characters, and in particular a common trick used when story has a large group of linked characters: Isolation.

No Complications

In real life when you meet people, they come with all kinds of existing connections. Friends, family, and romantic partners that pre-date your own association. Sometimes, though, these connections are obscured because of the circumstances surrounding your meeting. For example, when I met people in my dorm in freshman year of college, most of those pre-existing connections had been left behind, albeit temporarily. For a while it was possible to pretend these people were yours, that the only relationship that existed was the one between you and them.

Of course, it’s not true. For a while it might seem like you’re all living in an intimacy bubble, but eventually other relationships push in. But then exclusive feeling is pretty heady stuff. You get to imagine you know these people better than anyone else in the world.

And that’s a powerful trick to pull when writing about characters, and pretty common in TV writing. Consider Community, a show about a disparate group of people at a low-value community college who form a study group. The characters are a mix of adults re-calibrating their lives and younger folks who couldn’t hack a traditional 4-yera college for one reason or another, and during the run of the show there are vanishingly few relationships outside the group. When one member of the group has a problem, they turn to another member. All major milestones, holidays, and other major events are attended and facilitated by the group.

This is seductive because it’s easy. In real life, when you enjoy someone’s company you have to schedule around the rest of their life, and maintaining intimacy takes a lot of work. I a SitCom world, it just … happens. Once you know someone long enough, they’re your closest friend and every single thing that happens involves you, effortlessly. The kind of intimacy and embedding in someone’s life that normally takes years, if not a lifetime, just sort of happens effortlessly. That’s one of the appeals of these fictional relationships.

So, when you’re putting your own characters together, think about that. Delete any ‘pre-existing’ relationships that have nothing to do with your story, and imagine that these people form a freshman-year bubble. It heightens all the stakes and emphasizes the bonds between them in an unrealistic but effective way.

Last year I wrote an article for Writers Digest about figuring out if you have too many characters in your story or novel, which brings me to Doctor Who.

I’ve had a tumultuous relationship with the show. When I was a kid, my older brother, Yan, was obsessed with Tom Baker’s Number Four, and as a result I kind of avoided it on principle. In college I chose to become obsessed with the even more obscure and even more British show The Prisoner. When they rebooted the show in 2005, I kind of ignored it, and only started watching with Matt Smith’s Number Eleven, then worked my way (somewhat) backwards from there.

What’s been interesting over the eleven seasons of the show that have aired since the reboot is the collective character arc of the Doctors. Number Nine was so desperate to flee his past he basically ignored it and pretended not to have one, but subsequent doctors slowly strapped on the old stuff, evolving into unhappy lonely gods and oncoming storms and self-loathing madmen in a box. The two showrunners who guided nuWho through it’s first 10 seasons, Russell Davies and Steven Moffat, shared a certain love for silly epicness—their stories were frenetic, loud, frequently illogical, and usually kind of fun, but things got very cluttered as the old-school stuff barnacled on with some new twists until the whole character and the universe he inhabited was very loud and very distracting.

So, in the new season, a new showrunner took over. Chris Chibnall, known for his work on Broadchurch (and some Who scripts over the years), was brought in to basically do a soft reboot, clean things up, find a new tone. In a sense, the casting of Jodie Whitaker as the 13th Doctor wasn’t just about a long-overdue gender swap, but also about the character’s arc, which had hit maximum self-loathing with twelve and come through the other side to acceptance. Whitaker’s Thirteen is lighter, freer, happier. She’s shed a lot of the dead weight, and the new season is meant to be a return to basics—history lessons, alien invasions, and a Doctor who has rediscovered their curiosity and dedication to a moral and ethical universe.

To be honest, I thought the ten episodes of the new season ranged from meh to meh-meh. There were bright spots—Whitaker’s performance as The Doctor is breathless fun—but overall I wasn’t terribly excited by the stories. With Moffat and Davies there was a lot to complain about, but there were usually a couple of bangers in each season you could sink your teeth into, but Chibnall’s first go left me a bit cold. And I finally figured out why: There are too many companions. Chibnall needs to read my article and cut a few.

Too Many Cooks

In the unlikely case you’re not familiar with Doctor Who but are still reading (because you love me?), the companions are the (typically human) everyday folks the Time Lord picks up and brings along on his adventures. Their main function is to have someone the Doctor has to explain things to, of course, but they usually wind up becoming pretty important characters to the Doctor’s arc and the show’s storytelling.

In the first 10 seasons of the new show, the companions have usually been limited to one, with a few satellite companions who would cycle in and out. Amy Pond and her husband Rory were an exception, but Rory as a character was so utterly defined by his orbit around Amy they were basically a single binary companion.

As a result, the companions had interesting arcs in their own right—Rose from the first four seasons transformed from a shop girl into someone willing to sacrifice everything for love. Donna went from a trashy, irritating woman to a figure of almost unimaginable tragedy. Martha transformed into a kick-ass warrior. Amy became perhaps the first true friend the Doctor ever had. Clara, who initially over-existed as The Impossible Girl, slowly evolved into something akin to a formerly-human version of the Doctor (and hey, might still be out in that fictional universe, perhaps starring in a TV show in an alternate universe called Professor What). Bill Potts began as a curious, spirited woman who didn’t let a lack of funds hold her back, and wound up finding acceptance and love in a way she couldn’t have anticipated.

Which brings us to the crowded TARDIS of Thirteen’s run. She’s got three companions, and they’re all fine folks in their way. The problem with the new season is, they don’t get to do much in each episode, and they don’t get to grow much as characters, because there’s too many of them.

Fine, Upstanding, Really Boring People

In the past, having just one companion or, sometimes, a main companion and some satellite companions, allowed the show to focus on the companion’s development over the course of the season. This year, Chibnall introduced four folks in the first episode: Graham, an older gent recently in remission from cancer, his wife Grace, a force of goodwill, her son Ryan, a nice enough guy who has father issues and resents Graham’s attempts to charm him, and Yasmin Khan, a rookie police officer struggling against the boredom of her low-level postings and the patriarchy. Some spoilers to follow, in case you need the warning.

So far, so good. You can see what Chibnall is trying to do—bring in some gender and racial variety, ground the crazy alien madwoman in a box with some down-to-earth folks. Plus, he’s seeded in a few bits of conflict that can pay off later. And to be fair, some of it does pay off. Graham and Ryan begin the season with an awkward relationship, and end it very much family. But otherwise, not much happens and the three surviving companions (I said there were spoilers) are basically in the same positions as at the beginning of the season. Graham is a genial grandfather type who carries emergency sandwiches. Ryan is a snarky kid uncertain how he fits into the world. Yaz is an earnest young woman who has experienced racism and sexism. None of them can be said to have grown much, or been explored much.

And, frankly, this comes down to screen time. There just isn’t room in any given episode to deal much with their characters. If you’ve ever seen an episode of modern Doctor Who, you know they blaze by at warp speed; the main prerequisite for an actor taking on the role is the ability to say 5,000 lines of pseudo-sciency dialogue in about thirty seconds. With one companion, you can devote a few minutes to their personal arc. With three, it’s hard enough to figure out plot reasons for all of them to have something to do, much less explore their personal journeys.

It’s different in a novel, of course; you can just add a few thousand words here and there to expand and explore your characters. A TV show has a specific number of seconds to tell a story, and sacrifices must be made. But Doctor Who would be well advised to lose a companion, maybe two. And if your own characters aren’t much changed at the end of your story, consider if you need to spend more time with them—and maybe have fewer of them, to boot.